If you came in late, you’ll want to read Making
Movies I, Making
Movies II, and Making
Movies III.

Today being Saturday, it was time for David and I to do some more
shooting on our movie. I do try to learn from my mistakes, and so
things went much better this week right from the start. It was
cooler, for one thing; we started at 9:30 in the morning instead of
1:30 in the afternoon, and the light was better in the parts of the
yard I wanted to use.

I reshot one scene from last week, the one with Yellow the Snake
coming down and around the corner as the sun-shade terminator moves
noticeably; that spot is in complete (though not dim) shade during
the morning, so I was able to get the shot without trouble. In fact,
I ran through it twice, and not only did both versions come out well,
they also dovetail perfectly. It looks like there are two snakes
coming round the corner, one after the other. There are
possibilities there I’ll have to explore.

Next, I tried an experiment. I wanted a shot with a snake’s-eye-view
of the world. Trying to carry the camera smoothly at that level
clearly wasn’t going to work, not without a Steadicam, so that meant
I needed to be creative. Enter the tricycle.

My kids’ tricycle is colorful and made of an equal proportion of plastic and
metal, but otherwise it’s a lot like the one I had as a kid. In
particular, there’s a kind of plastic step that covers the axel
between the rear wheels. The Sony TRV-22 fits onto that step quite
nicely. Voila–I’ve got a mobile platform that’s close to the
ground. The camera points out the back of the tricycle, of course,
so to move the camera forwards one just rolls the tricycle backwards.

Now, the section of ground where I wanted to shoot this is paved with
bricks, and it’s rather bumpy. I thought that shooting continuously
while rolling the tricycle probably wasn’t going to work very well,
so I animated it, taking a few frames, moving the trike a few inches,
taking a few more frames, and so on. I might as well not have wasted
my time; the result was incredibly ugly.

Next I decide to try just shooting it live. I repositioned the
tricycle, turned the camera on, and set it on the little shelf at the
back, and just rolled the trike slowly along my desired path. The
result was rather bumpy, more so than seemed natural, but much better
than the animated version.

As I was setting up the next shot, I realized that I’d been shooting
with the camera zoomed in a bit–no wonder the result was bumpier than
I’d though it should be. The zoom was magnifying every motion of the
camera. Consequently, I went back and did that shot three more times
shooting full wide (twice rolling the camera forwards and once rolling
it backwards–I can reverse the clip direction in iMovie), and had no
trouble except that toward the end of the backwards shot the camera
fell off of its shelf. It kept recording, though, video and
audio, and I think it’s a tribute to my years as a father that all I
said was “Whoops!”

Ironically, the backwards shot is probably the smoothest, best looking
shot, once I reversed it and cut out the bit where the camera fell
down. Naturally, it’s also the shortest. Go figure. But anyway, now I
have four to choose from.

After that we went back to doing the stop action thing. We got a
great shot of Yellow crawling out of the umbrella hole in the middle
of our picnic table, and then I reshot Yellow going down the steps and
around the corner as I described earlier. And it was about that time
that David said, “Can Megatron be in the movie?” My first thought was
to say, “No, this is a movie about snakes, not about robots”–but I
reconsidered, and I’m glad I did. The song Attacked By Snakes
is fully five minutes long, and scenes of Yellow crawling around the
yard by himself are going to be diverting for maybe half that time.
Clearly I needed some additional elements, and Megatron was a perfect
choice.

For those of you not blessed with young boys, Megatron is a
Transformer from the Transformers Armada TV show. He’s a robot that
transforms into a battle tank. I saw definite possibilities–and was
not slow to give them a try. The results are truly delightful.

All in all, I got about 40 to 45 seconds of good animated video; I’ve
posted about 30 seconds worth as a highly compressed Quicktime
movie–it’s about 368K bytes in size. If you downloaded last
week’s clip, be sure not to miss this week’s; it’s a lot more fun.